A significant portion of the retail economy is driven by, and thus devoted to, the giving of gifts. This is especially true during certain seasons of the year, the most obvious example being the Christmas season. However, birthdays and other anniversaries provide impetus for the purchasing and giving of gifts throughout the entire year.
A common problem is often encountered when giving gifts, i.e., that of finding an appropriate item to give. Whereas generic gifts such as cash and gift certificates overcome the problem of matching a gift to its intended recipient, such an item does not in itself convey any sentiment and can thus leave the recipient with less than the expected level of excitement. However, to make the generic gift more personable, it is often accompanied by a greeting card, which allows the sender or the giver of the gift to convey an appropriate sentiment.
The greeting card industry enjoys a large share of the gift giving marketplace in that not only do greeting cards accompany gifts, but in many cases, the greeting card is the gift. That is to say, that the giver's gift is actually the sentiment conveyed by the card. The greeting card industry capitalizes on this fact by producing a wide array of cards having an even wider array of sentiments pre-printed thereon.
In choosing an appropriate card, the giver is confronted with the difficulty of selecting the card that simultaneously is appropriate to the occasion, the personality of the recipient and the sentiment the giver wishes to convey. Blank cards, i.e., greeting cards which are provided for personalization by the giver, overcome this shortcoming of pre-composed greeting cards to some degree, but require varying amounts of effort on the part of the giver to author the desired sentiment, and to do so in a neat and aesthetically pleasing way. Some artistic talent is often required when the giver wishes to add some graphic designs to the card.
Since the early days of personal computing, software has been made available for the purpose of authoring greeting cards and for printing the authored cards on a graphic-capable printer coupled to a personal computer. Most greeting card software includes a library of pre-composed graphics that a user may arrange into a desired graphic arrangement. This has allowed thousands, if not millions, of artistically-challenged gift givers to produce high quality, personalized greeting cards. However, the purchase of a greeting card software package may not be justifiable if the user only wishes to produce a small number of cards.
As an alternative to purchasing greeting card software, user-operated terminals, sometimes in the form of a kiosk, have been in use and have enjoyed some popularity. A user may format a given card at the kiosk, via software executed thereon, for a nominal fee. Such alternative is beneficial to those who wish to produce the occasional personalized greeting card. Even so, the capabilities provided by such known systems are typically limited to permitting users to select from pre-set optional designs, messages, and the like. They provide neither the breadth nor flexibility of capabilities to enable the user to actually formulate or compose original graphic designs and layouts of the card.
In the general case, when a greeting card accompanies a gift, the card is read and treated separately from the gift. As the recipient uses the gift apart from the card, the original sentiment conveyed by the greeting card is moved further back into memory until, eventually, the original sentiment that accompanied the gift becomes completely disassociated from it. Whereas the gift may still have some sentimental value, the original, desired sentiment of the giver remains filed away on the greeting card.
In light of the foregoing discussion of the prior art, the need is felt for a generic gift which can be creatively personalized with great flexibility at a user-operated station by a gift giver such that the original sentiment is conveyed each time the gift is used for its intended purpose.